WePay: The Online Payment Start-up Behind Occupy Wall Street

http://www.forbes.com/sites/elizabethwoyke/2012/01/31/wepay-the-online-payment-startup-behind-occupy-wall-street/

by billclerico • 14 years ago

101 27 14 years ago

SeanDav• 14 years ago

I would love to see more services like this accessible outside the US. If PayPal is the 800 pound gorilla in the US it is the 1000-pound-armour-plated-gorilla-with-phasers-set-to-evaporate in Europe.

lucisferre2• 14 years ago

Just curious, is Wepay not available outside of the US? I was under the impression it could be used in Canada, but perhaps not.

notatoad2• 14 years ago

it is not. we don't get any of the cool payment gateways in canada.

gst2• 14 years ago

I think there are two main reasons for this:

(1) US laws make it rather hard for payment companies to operate outside the US (mainly due to money laundering laws). If you want to operate in Europe it seems much easier if the whole company is located there.

(2) There's just not as much demand for this. The US banking system feels archaic and you typically can't even electronically transfer funds between bank accounts (if not both of the accounts belong to yourself). In Europe - on the other hand - you typically can do free wire transfers and just need the recipient's IBAN and BIC numbers for this.

stfu• 14 years ago

But you have to consider that for end consumers the transfer fees are just ridiculous. Depending on your bank account settings it is not unusual to have a €15 transaction fee + 0.20% of the transfered amount. I have often customers from other EU countries who don't have PayPal and prefer sending money through registered mail just because other options are not economical for smaller amounts of money.

davidpoarch• 14 years ago

The article states: "[WePay's] ambition: to move beyond what WePay calls the “unstructured economy” to be the dominant way people make payments and buy things online. ...Since WePay can’t yet match PayPal’s brand or awareness, it aims to offer more appealing design, an expedited set-up process and better customer service."

If WePay intends to overtake PayPal, I think it will need to do more than that. An "appealing design, an expedited set-up process and better customer service" are easy to replicate.

How about thinking out of the box and re-engineering the system? How about focusing on and addressing PayPal's weaknesses? How about creating a system that inherently includes automatic fraud prevention (for both buyers and sellers)? How about minimizing (nearly eliminating) all dispute resolution scenarios? How about extending such protection to the services marketplace (as opposed to just products)? How about creating a truly globalized payments platform (there are several countries where PayPal fails because credit cards are not used or available as the main form of payment)?

I am a co-founder of a nascent third party payments aggregator (TPPA) called PayGuard. We are currently building our Beta, and our system addresses all these issues.

Steltek• 14 years ago

I think the biggest asset would simply being "not PayPal". PP has been cultivating a bad PR problem lately and systems like these will have a social lock-in effect. Not quite as bad as Facebook vs Google+ but people would be reluctant to wander too far out of bounds, especially when bank accounts are concerned.

You seem to have some great goals yourself, however. Good luck to you!

EREFUNDO2• 14 years ago

Actually it is the sellers that PayPal is turning off. Their dispute resolution policies are abstruse and keep changing in their attempt to protect buyers. They have relied too heavily in freezing, closing, and even withdrawing money from sellers’ accounts without prior notice. So many eBay sellers who have relied on PayPal had their entire businesses destroyed with one incident. A payment system that focuses on preventive security would not rely on such heavy handed tactics when resolving disputes between buyers and sellers. If all users (buyers and sellers) have an equal distribution of control during the entire transaction then incentives for committing fraud on both sides will be effectively eliminated. Right now one party gets paid then the other has to wait for his merchandise. PayGuard will solve these problems. The challenge now is to get people to start trusting new players in the market.

nickolai• 14 years ago

>An "appealing design, an expedited set-up process and better customer service" are easy to replicate.

For any bigco the size of paypal to replicate it, they would first need to realise they are doing it wrong. Which requires a relatively large critical mass of people in the management chain to accept that they've been doing it wrong. That will never happen. And then there's the technical issues of going from wrong way to right way without interrupting service. That likely requires a lot of very skilled people, many of whom probably left for greener pastures when they first saw the "wrong way" sign.

Those juggernauts just cannot turn on a dime.

EREFUNDO2• 14 years ago

It's amazing how bureaucracy can make it difficult for large companies to make simple changes. I think we should create a better model for running large organizations. The "flat" model seems to be promising but is still not sufficient to fight the inertia that is built during a company's growth stage. Maybe decentralization if done correctly will work.

dw5ight• 14 years ago

stick it to the man, wepay!!!!

latchkey3• 14 years ago

I'm a huge fan of WePay. My founder and I needed a Java implementation of their api, so we wrote one: https://github.com/lookfirst/WePay-Java-SDK

They are thinking out of the box by providing services that developers need. A well documented API and near real-time feedback with their core engineers. In this regard, PayPal is a joke.

sounds• 14 years ago

I'll add my data point as well. I needed a no-brainer payment system. I didn't even have to set up a server - 5 minutes, done.

I've tried on paypal. I can add a PayPal button to my own page but I didn't have a page for my project this time. I would have had to set it all up (again). No, thanks!

ryan_f3• 14 years ago

I've had a different experience using their Ruby SDK and have not found it as friendly for developers. Their API is decently documented but their implementation for paying is dependent on redirects and URL callbacks. The ruby SDK provides little more than a wrapper for passing and retrieving JSON. Some may prefer this but I felt that I was reinventing the wheel.

I am staying with them for one project because of some services they have that no one else offers.

I am rooting for WePay but they need to work more on their SDKs to be developer friendly.

latchkey3• 14 years ago

I'm curious, what more did you expect? Exactly what wheels are being reinvented here?

Their API is pretty brain dead simple (it is just a matter of passing urls and data around) and the documentation is pretty good once you understand the general concepts.

I've given them a bit of feedback on things in the docs that needed improvement, and they've turned around with fixes within minutes sometimes.

I think that if you give them feedback on their apis mailing list about what you'd like to see added or changed, they'd be more than happy to listen. That is what really encourages me about this company.

JumpCrisscross• 14 years ago

How does WePay contrast with Stripe?

joelrunyon• 14 years ago

From what I know, WePay is much more friendly to everyday users. From what I've seen of Stripe, it seems to be more developer focused.

I've used WePay and they have really great customer service. Stripe is intriguing, but I haven't had a reason to use it yet.

Either way, I'm happy to see as many newcomers take on paypal as possible!

tlrobinson• 14 years ago

I think WePay is easier for non-developers to setup (no website or programming required), while Stripe is more focused on making their API awesome for developers.

ryan_f3• 14 years ago

After integrating both, this is right on the money. WePay is great for what it offers on a basic level. Stripe is better with integrating with a site and its features.

SoftwareMaven• 14 years ago

And Stripe really is awesome for developers. I just integrated it into our site and it was a great experience.

latchkey3• 14 years ago

For us, Stripe is lacking a marketplace feature.

We use this feature to sell someone else's widgets on our website. The money is collected into a FDIC insured bank account for the seller, that we can create with an API call. Money goes immediately into that account as soon as it comes in. We take our cut, wepay takes theirs and the money is deposited. The seller can then xfer the money into their own bank account. We also use an iframe based form for collecting the payment information. This way, it integrates cleanly into our website and we don't have to manage any of that process.

This is a feature that PayPal has, but they have a horrible API and even worse documentation. WePay's is simple, clean and full of awesome. They also have a nice staging system that identically mirrors their production system, so it makes it easy to do development and testing.

mattchew• 14 years ago

The Forbes headline seems to say WePay is backing or at least somehow rooting for Occupy Wall Street.

It's a misleading headline. OWS is using WePay for donations, and WePay didn't shut down the OWS accounts, omg the controversy.

WePay: The Online Payment Start-up Behind Occupy Wall Street

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